When people tell me, an archaeologist, what they find exciting about our profession
* big royal jewelry
* ancient temples
* decoding a long lost language
* dinosaurs
What actually gets us excited
* that time we were lucky with the weather
* when the digger knows his job
* lifting skeletal remains and the ribs don’t break
* when you manage to put the scale down for a photo without creating new crumbs
When you tell a member of a descendant community about what you found and they go “no shit! Uncle Tommy told me about that!”
Things that are where they shouldn’t be. Bonus points if it’s obsidian
Hitting virgin sediment before hitting the water table
Conspicuously dense and diverse berry patches
Cut marks on bones. Bonus points if they’re more than 20,000 years old
In addition to these because those were spectacularly relatable for Australian archaeology:
When the temperature is Just Right™ for fieldwork
When the car has really good aircon travelling from site in the afternoon
One of the Indigenous representatives on a fieldsurvey goes “hey i wanna show you something” (it is ALWAYS something worth looking at)
a member of the public shows up to talk and DOESNT say “found any gold????” but actually knows things about the site
Things that are where they shouldn’t be AND that make the senior archaeologists blurt out “well thats weird”
pets visiting
Can’t answer the berry thing with 100% certainty so I’ll let @rhysintherain explain it if they’re willing but I can answer the obsidian thing: obsidian is an EXTREMELY useful material. Can be cut into incredibly sharp and fine tools and weapons. Has been used by humans for eons. Plus it’s pretty. Obsidian also has a very specific geographic range because it is created by volcanic eruptions from magma with specific mineral components. So when you find some in a geographic location that doesn’t have any natural obsidian? You have solid evidence of human trade networks. Very exciting indeed.
On top of that, obsidian can be fingerprinted to the exact flow it came from, to the point where Rudy Reimer has identified several flows from the same volcano with different fingerprints.
So if you find a piece of obsidian at a site and go “huh, I wonder where that came from?” There’s a solid chance you can send it to someone with an XRF gun and they’ll be able to tell you.
The berry patches thing isn’t as widely recognised or utilised in applied archaeology (although it really, really should be), but Chelsea Armstrong has done some amazing work with descent communities that combines ethnobotany and archaeology, and has found that the density and diversity of food plants, especially trees and shrubs, is higher near old village sites than in “wild” forest.
These forest gardens were cultivated by indigenous communities before contact, and even after the people were removed from their villages they continue be incredibly productive sources of food.
There’s an abandoned village site on crown land near where I grew up that is surrounded by a circle of extremely dense berry bushes. At a site where I worked a few years ago, the area was covered in patches of native wild mint. A site I visited that was home to a very wealthy precontact village there was considerably more Saskatoon berry shrubs than anywhere else in the area.
The plants remember where they were taken care of. The stones remember where they were born. The best archaeologists know how to listen to that sort of thing.
Qalaat al-Hosn (قلعة الحصن), more famously known as Krak des Chevaliers, is arguably the best preserved and most impressive Crusader castle surviving today. It is one of the highlights of a visit to Syria, and should be considered a must on any itinerary. The castle was been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2006.
Krak des Chevaliers or Crac des Chevaliers (French pronunciation: [kʁak de ʃ(ə)valje]; Arabic: قلعة الحصن, romanized: Qalʿat al-Ḥiṣn), also called Ḥiṣn al-Akrād (حصن الأكراد, literally “Fortress of the Kurds”) and formerly Crac de l'Ospital, is a Crusader castle in Syria and one of the most important preserved medieval castles in the world. The site was first inhabited in the 11th century by Kurdish troops garrisoned there by the Mirdasids. In 1142 it was given by Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, to the order of the Knights Hospitaller. It remained in their possession until it fell in 1271.
A team of researchers with Cardiff University, the Mary Rose Trust, HM Naval Base and the British Geological Survey’s National Environmental Isotope Facility has found evidence of racial diversity among the crew of the Mary Rose—a warship from the time of King Henry the VIII. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, they describe their study and analysis of the remains of eight sailors recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose.
The Mary Rose served the Tudor navy for approximately 33 years, but was finally sunk during a battle in the Solent in 1545. The wreck was discovered back in 1971 and raised in 1982. Since that time, a dedicated museum houses not only the ship but the thousands of artifacts that were brought up along with it.
In this new effort, the researchers sought to learn more about the backgrounds of the crew. To that end, they selected the remains of eight of sailors chosen by their degree of preservation and their likely stations aboard the ship. Read more.
